Motifs

Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary
devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.

Dream

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland takes
place in Alice’s dream, so that the characters and phenomena of
the real world mix with elements of Alice’s unconscious state. The
dream motif explains the abundance of nonsensical and disparate
events in the story. As in a dream, the narrative follows the dreamer
as she encounters various episodes in which she attempts to interpret
her experiences in relationship to herself and her world. Though
Alice’s experiences lend themselves to meaningful observations,
they resist a singular and coherent interpretation.

Subversion

Alice quickly discovers during her travels that the only
reliable aspect of Wonderland that she can count on is that it will
frustrate her expectations and challenge her understanding of the
natural order of the world. In Wonderland, Alice finds that her
lessons no longer mean what she thought, as she botches her multiplication tables
and incorrectly recites poems she had memorized while in Wonderland.
Even Alice’s physical dimensions become warped as she grows and
shrinks erratically throughout the story. Wonderland frustrates
Alice’s desires to fit her experiences in a logical framework where
she can make sense of the relationship between cause and effect.

Language

Carroll plays with linguistic conventions in Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland, making use of puns and playing
on multiple meanings of words throughout the text. Carroll invents
words and expressions and develops new meanings for words. Alice’s
exclamation “Curious and curiouser!” suggests that both her surroundings
and the language she uses to describe them expand beyond expectation and
convention. Anything is possible in Wonderland, and Carroll’s manipulation
of language reflects this sense of unlimited possibility.

Curious, Nonsense,
and Confusing

Alice uses these words throughout her journey to describe
phenomena she has trouble explaining. Though the words are generally interchangeable,
she usually assigns curious and confusing to
experiences or encounters that she tolerates. She endures is the
experiences that are curious or confusing, hoping to gain a clearer
picture of how that individual or experience functions in the world.
When Alice declares something to be nonsense, as
she does with the trial in Chapter 12, she rejects or criticizes
the experience or encounter.